The “secret” Bay Area routes that Apple, Google, Facebook and more use to shuttle employees to HQ

You may be familiar with Stamen design, and you may not be. But you’ve likely seen their work at some point. Stamen is a design studio that builds maps and does data visualization for clients like MTV, MSNBC, BMW, Yahoo and more.

Every once in a while one of their projects bubbles to the surface of the internet on its own too. A set of its beautiful watercolor tiles for OpenStreetMaps was shared by Jason Santa Maria a few months ago. The beauty of the project caused a lot of people to get excited about the possibility that Apple’s maps might look as good.

Apple went with (I feel) some very attractive vector maps, but I still like Stamen’s designs.

Now, the studio has made a new cool little shareable design (which we discovered via SFGate): A map of the shuttle routes that Silicon Valley giants use to cart their employees from various parts of San Francisco and the Bay Area to their headquarters. These routes aren’t publicized or published outside the company, but they’re not exactly “secret”. Still, it’s a fun tidbit of information.